Introducing Gally

For my senior design project in school, I decided to design and write a program for teaching sign languages on Linux. It was in a "working prototype" stage when I presented it in school in April. I had a few more things I wanted to get right before announcing it to the whole FOSS world, but I just got confirmation from Nigel Babu that the last known bug in RC3 is fixed, so it's time to release!

Here's what it looks like (though that "France" sign video is removed since I did the sign backwards…should probably correct the text under it…oops):

Packages for version 0.5 (what I'm calling the first stable release) are in the Gally stable release PPA for Lucid, and in Universe for Maverick. It'll be uploaded to Debian Unstable soon.

This release only supports American Sign Language, but some of the lessons have been translated into French and German. On the roadmap for 1.0 is support for installing multiple sign languages (yes, places have different sign languages), hopefully through KGetHotNewStuff. Quizzing should also be in that version. That means that people who know BSL, LSF, DSL, Auslan, NZSL, or any of the others whose names I don't know are certainly wanted to start preparing lessons for that version!

I suspect a bit of an FAQ is in order:

1. Why name it "Gally"?
   
   • That is the nickname for Gallaudet, which can refer either to Gallaudet University or Thomas Gallaudet, who started the first deaf school in the US. It was based on French teaching methods.



2. What licence is it under?
   
   • GPLv3


3. What's it written in?
   
   • PyKDE



4. What if I use GNOME?
   
   • Use sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gally to avoid pulling in half of Kubuntu


5. Is there an IRC channel?
   
   
   • Yes, #gally on irc.freenode.net


6. How can I help?
   
   • Suggest lesson topics
   
   
   
   • Write up a lesson plan (list of signs for a suggested lesson or one you thought of)
   
   
   • Convert a lesson plan into XML
   
   
   • Submit videos of you signing what's in a lesson plan
   
   
   • Make or find CC-BY or CC-BY-SA clipart or photos to work as "context" with the lessons (like the French flag in the screenshot)
   
   
   • Help make the GUI translatable

You will need to download the ASL lesson pack (link is to this month's snapshot) to study ASL. Use your favourite archive manager (Ark, File Roller, tar) to put the contents in either ~/.kde/share/apps/gally/ (if only you will use it) or /usr/share/kde4/apps/gally/ (for all users on the system). That means the lessons.lang ends up in ~/.kde/share/apps/gally/ASL/ or /usr/share/kde4/apps/gally/ASL/

Thanks go to the folks who've been testing and Nigel in particular for helping me roll through RCs, Paul Hummer for writing the original setup.py when I am new enough to Python to have never done this, and Karen Rustad for making a nice icon (which isn't in the screenshot, since it's an old one) based on the ASL sign for "teach."